Cynical Sarah

Welcome to my special view of the world.

Crazy Busy

Posted by Cynical Sarah on October 7, 2010

My resolution to write more and keep up with this site better obviously fell by the wayside again. Life just got super busy in the last month or so. Even with my “No TV During the Day Challenge” there just didn’t seem to be much time to sit and write. Other life factors got in the way to make me lose ambition too.

I’m going to leave it all a mystery for now. Well, not all of it. I’ve been working on trying to get more freelance work, also known as “fill in the gap in the resume work.” I signed up with oDesk and managed to get a little work through that site.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on my resume and trying to do a better job of targeting the jobs I’m interested in and the companies I want work with.

Along with that, my whole routine has been trashed for more than a month now as they worked on the repiping project in our building. It wasn’t too much of a disruption until they had to start work in our condo. Then they had to extend the amount of time they needed to work in our condo.

The rough part was that I had to be up, showered and dressed by 8 a.m. because they had to have access from 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. each day. They weren’t always in here, but they had to have access just in case something went wrong or they were actually going to do some work in here. There have also been about 6 days when the water was shut off all day too, so if I didn’t get a shower in right away, I was just out of luck.

It also made it hard to fit in a workout during the day. When there was no water, it was gross just thinking about going for a run and not being able to shower afterwards. On the other days, I never knew if and when they’d be in my condo, so again, showering in the middle of the day after a workout didn’t seem like a good option.

Now that they have officially wrapped up work in our condo, the hubby and I are taking the opportunity to get our condo looking a little nicer. By nice, mostly I mean less cluttered. We’ve done some nice work with painting and whatnot the last few years, but we just have too much stuff for our place.

So as long as we had chaos going on already, we figured we’d add to it with an effort to organize and weed out things we don’t really need.

All that leads up to hopefully having it all done by Saturday this week so we can have some people over for a Thanksgiving dinner. (For those of you in the States, Canada celebrates its Thanksgiving in October.)

So here I am again, full of excuses and plenty of reasons why I’ve been too busy to post anything new. And I’ll probably still not get around to writing and posting much because I’ve got some more freelance work to do, plus I had a job interview that has panned out for a second interview next week plus a homework assignment to test my abilities for the job as well.

The good news is that part of our efforts to pare down gave me an idea for another project for the site. I’m releasing some of my books back into the wild. Some of them can’t be released until I get a review written for them, but then they’re going off to various book drops, good wills and whatnot. Stay tuned to see how this turns out to be a project for the site. ;)


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No TV During the Day Challenge: The Rest of the Week

Posted by Cynical Sarah on September 17, 2010

One week  of the No TV During the Day Challenge turned out to be pretty easy. It certainly helps when you have a mound of things taken from your cupboards and closets and furniture all piled in front of the TV to make room for a work crew.

Monday and Tuesday we had people in here most of the day working on the repiping project that’s going on in our building. It was incentive to get out of here for most of the day both days, and making room for them to work also made it darn near impossible to see the TV anyway.

They didn’t come in at all on Wednesday, but I had the space still cleared in case they started repairwork on the walls they had cut through. On Thursday, same deal except they actually were in here for about an hour and a half or so to mud and tape walls. Meanwhile, I had gone to the store for a new dryer vent clamp and to costco for kitty litter.

Friday they came in to put the dryer back in and that was it. So I could have moved stuff around and watched TV, but only gave in for about 20 minutes while I ate some lunch.

I wish I could say I did more productive things with that time. I spent one day finding all our photo files and getting them backed up onto a storage drive, plus scanning in a few photos to go with our digitals. I did get a job application done on Wednesday, and managed to score a little freelance work that will start on Monday from one of those freelance sites.

I’m not sure accomplishing those things was an actual product of the No TV Challenge, but I’ll give it the credit anyway. I may even try to keep it up more often.


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No TV During the Day Challenge: Day 2 & 3

Posted by Cynical Sarah on September 14, 2010

Day 2 of my TV challenge already brought the need for a clarification in the rules of the challenge. I completely neglected to factor in that the NFL regular season started Sunday.

How could I possibly stick to not watching TV during the day when the games start at 10 a.m. and run most of the day?

The clarification had to be that I can’t mindlessly watch TV during the day. If I’m actively participating in a show, like watching football to see how my fantasy football team players are doing, that’s acceptable. If I’m just watching TV to pass the time without really caring what I’m watching, that’s not acceptable.

So now that we have that clarification, yes, I watched football pretty much all day on Sunday. Then Troy had hockey sunday evening. I went and watched him play and also took my netbook to do a little editing work.

Monday was much easier to follow the No TV During the Day Challenge since the workers came in at 8 a.m. on the dot to start work on the repiping, and I decided to just get out of there. I spent a large chunk of the morning chatting with my sister-in-law before getting some lunch and doing a few errands and going home around 3 p.m.

I was home for a few hours – just enough time to do a little job searching and make myself some dinner before heading out the door again to go bowling. I signed up for a bowling league on Monday nights. I’m still unsure if I actually am on a team or if I’ll be switching to another league next week, but I did have a fun bowling with the ladies Monday night.

I have’t bowled regularly in years, so it was pretty surprising when I bowled a 144 the first game. Not so surprising when I couldn’t break 100 for the two after that. At least my average is nice and low for the season.

Now I need to get to work on some cover letters and get some job apps out there again. I’ll let you know how my adventures go today with no TV, and at some point these will be more interesting posts too – hopefully.


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No TV During the Day Challenge: Day 1

Posted by Cynical Sarah on September 11, 2010

It begins. Generally my weekends are the same as my week days since I’m not working, so TV watching is my time killer pretty much any day of the week. What makes it harder to stick to the challenge and break away from the TV on the weekends is that Troy is also home, and I have a hard time making plans to get out of here if he doesn’t want to do anything.

Today I already had a plan in place to combat that. I haven’t gone to Stanley Park and walked the seawall all summer this year. I usually find a reason to go a few times each summer, but not this one. We didn’t have anyone come visit, and I didn’t make plans with anyone to walk  the seawall for fun this time.

The rain held off until this evening today, so I got my butt in gear and made the trek downtown to the park. My goal was to test my jogging skills, or perhaps test my jogging stamina or jogging fitness is a better way to put it, and jog the seawall from one side of Stanley Park all the way around to the other side.

I had no clue how far it actually would be. My jogs are 30 minutes, and I don’t often push myself to go beyond that so I was pretty much hoping that the distance would fit neatly inside that time or at least close to it.

I lucked out. The path I took around the outer rim fit nearly into my 30 minutes, and I decided to keep jogging a bit further and make it a full 5k before I slowed to a speed walk.

So here’s the proof:

(It should be noted that the first 4.5 minutes are walking from the bus to the seawall, and then I jogged for 35 minutes before slowing to a speed walk again as I cut across the park and reached the bus stop.)

Something I learned from my adventure is that jogging close to home is much easier just because I don’t have to take as much with me. Normally I can throw my keys in my pocket and grab my mp3 player and head out the door. Today I had to make sure I had water, a cell phone, a bus pass, and at least a credit card in case I needed it. That meant also having a small pouch to put all that in, and carrying my water in my hand while I jogged.

I now have rope burn across my chest and an area of my tummy that’s red from where the pouch rubbed while I ran. Super attractive.

Point Number 2 against going downtown to jog: Having to get back on a bus and then the skytrain while crusty with dried sweat and not really sure what I smelled like. I know there was a coconut smell from my sunscreen, but beyond that who knows, so I owe apologies to all the transit riders near me  today. Sorry.

The aftermath of the run served to kill some more time out of my day. After some lunch, I figured a successful run around the seawall merited a nice bubble bath. Then I took time to blow out my hair nice too. Then I made a popcorn snack and sat down to write some blogs and do my usual social network checking.

And now here I am. In a few minutes, I’ll go start our nice steak dinner with fresh corn on the cob and artisan multi-grain bread. Then I’ll be allowed some TV time since Troy will be ready to watch some shows by then.

No TV During the Day Challenge Day One = Success.


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Sleeping Genius

Posted by Cynical Sarah on

It’s been more than a month since I’ve posted anything on my site. No blogs, no book reviews, no movie review, nothing. That’s what I was thinking about as a lay in bed last night trying to get to sleep.

I’ve had all sorts of free time, and the end result hasn’t been lots more writing done. Instead, it’s been dull boredom that has drained my brain of creativity and ideas to write about. So not only have I been lacking in the site upkeep department, I haven’t been good about writing any fiction like I want to or even editing the work I have done.

So there I lay in bed thinking about this and I have the brilliant revalation that the story I’m working on needs to be in first-person, and then I start writing the blog I want to post about these thoughts in my head.

Oddly enough, it turns out when I picture myself writing, I picture myself as sort of the prim and proper secretary type sitting ram-rod straight in front of a typewriter … yes, a typewriter. In reality, I tend to be slouched over a laptop keyboard either sitting cross-legged on the couch or at my desk in the computer room. Rarely am I even out of my pajamas for this work, and when I am, it’s certainly not in exchange for a button up shirt, pencil skirt and heels.

I suppose that wildly inaccurate picture of myself is at least a good indicator that my imagination still has some juice left. Maybe I just need to write when I’m half asleep.

If this blog entry is any indication, I probably should try that idea. It took me more than half a day to even remember that I wanted to write a blog after pretty much writing it in my head last night. Then I couldn’t remember half of what I wanted to say anyway.

I’m almost positive what I had last night was 200% better thought out than this thing is today, but at least I’m putting in the effort to make it happen. And I’m going to start trying to make that effort more often again. Since I’m lacking in imagination, creativity, motivation, or whatever you want to call that little secret glimmer that guides us to create brilliant, entertaining things for other people, I’ve come up with a few things to motivate myself.

First will be the “No TV During the Day Challenge.” Don, don daaaaaaaa!

Scary for so many of us who have nothing better to do than sit in front of the TV and let it pass the time for us. So starting today, I’m not watching TV until my hubby is home from work and ready for his evening of TV snuggle time. This weekend, I’m avoiding it unless we’re both going to watch one of the shows we have on tap.

So each day, I’ll be forced to find other things to do. (Hopefully that means lots more writing.) I’ll also blog about what I did instead so anyone who wants to know what a person does without TV can find out.

My second initiative is to get cracking on reviews of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched in the past few months. We’ve done a lot of camping and other activities, but I haven’t just been a couch sloth on the other days. Time to show what I’ve been up to.

My third thing is to find inspiration to do some more fiction writing. That’s easier said than done since I haven’t had much luck thus far in all my free time. But I know there is a short fiction contest that should be coming up in one of the newspapers. There’s also NaNoWriMo coming up in November and I probably should come up with a good idea if I’m going to give it a run again this year.

I’m also open to any ideas to get me going. I’d like to start posting up some short fiction work now and again, but I need some inspiration, something to give me a jump start again.

Now if only I could figure out how to hook up a computer to read my brainwaves and write this stuff when I’m in bed trying to sleep.


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Those Darn Kids!!

Posted by Cynical Sarah on August 4, 2010

There’s nothing like hearing about an 8-year-old whose paintings sell for thousands of dollars and a pop idol who is something like 12 penning his first memoirs to really make a person feel pretty behind the life curve. Not only have I been mainly unemployed for more than a year, I seem to have been wasting my life since second grade based on the teen phenoms sprouting up everywhere.

At least the Justin Bieber memoir was a misunderstanding. It’s actually just a book of behind-the-scenes pictures during his rise to fame. Which seems more appropriate for the now 16-year-old pop singer who’s main fan base still relates better to picture books than to chapter books.

But still, how does a kid go from being just your average teen to international superstar? Bieber did it. Miley Cyrus did it. Look at all those kids from High School Musical.

Then there’s the story about the “Mini Monet,” an 8-year-old kid in Britain who has sold some of his paintings for a total of more than $200,000. Not only did his family discover he has a talent for painting, he actually has the drive at such a young age to keep at his “hobby.”  On top of that, other people, important art world people, decided he has something special and they buy his stuff up like hotcakes.

There must be some sort of magic or voodoo you have to do for your kids for them to get that lucky. The stars certainly don’t align like that for the vast majority of us.

It’s not even just about the fame along with that fortune. I went to a conference once where a woman in her early 20s was one of the presenters because she had started a successful internet company when she was in her teens and was now considered one of the top online content authorities.

She’s not a household name, but she found her niche as a teen and now lives quite comfortably off the fruits of her early labor.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life at age 8 or as a teen, or when I went off to college, or even now. But I certainly wish I’d had those kind of aspirations so I could look back now and feel like I’ve accomplished more than just treading life’s waters. Those millions of dollars in savings would come in handy for an early retirement too.


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